El Payaso said:
'darkest point' 'depressing'. Of course. This is Batman. Parents killed, mentally disturbed.
The great thing about Batman is that there are so many possible ways to interpret the character. Frank Miller's way is one way. And a very good way. But by no means definitive.
Frank's Batman is almost like the Punisher. I love the Punisher. I love Batman. But to me there are some lines that separate the two.
Should Batman's world be dark? Absolutely. He's an orphan who is driven to fight crime because of the injustice that was done to him. He dresses as a nocturnal animal that most people have an irrational fear of, and he is certainly a fearsome warrior.
But the version of Batman that I always like - Denny O'Neill's Batman, for instance; Marv Wolfman's, Alan Grant's, Paul Dini's Batmen - is that he is motivated by more than just revenge. He is also motivated by compassion. He wants to make sure that what happened to him, doesn't happen to anybody else. As Alfred says in Begins, "I care for Rachel, too, sir, but what you're doing has to be beyond that. It can't be personal. Or you're just a vigilante." That's a distinction that few writers in the last 15 years or so have been smart enough to make.
I think that Frank Miller understands it, too. Frank's Batman in DKR is a Batman who was that man once, but has become so jaded and frazzled by his one-man war on crime, and the toll that it's taken on the people he cares about, that he's ready to end it once and for all. He's gone around a bend that he has always clung to with his life.
That's what's depressing about it. My favorite hero has lost his soul. And that's why the new Batman comics suck. Because the writers now are all influenced by what Frank did, and none of them are smart enough to UNDERSTAND what Frank did.
A little-known fact: DKR was published a year before Jason Todd was killed off in the comic books. Frank Miller was way ahead of everybody.
